DOWN WE GO! Fordham slips in US ranking — again

The university’s national ranking has fallen for the third straight year.

Fordham was slated the 58th best college in the country on this year’s annualU.S. News & World Report ranking — a highly anticipated list for college officials and prospective students across the country.

This continues the Rams’ downward trend: They were ranked 57th on the 2013 list after reaching a best of 52nd on the 2012 list.

Before this lull, Fordham’s profile had been steadily rising for a decade, from a low of 84th on the 2002 U.S. News list.

Bob Howe, a spokesman for Fordham, declined to comment on this year’s ranking.

Fordham shares the number 58 spot with Southern Methodist University, Syracuse University and the University of Connecticut. Princeton University was number one on the list for the third year in a row.

Among the factors that U.S. News uses to rank national universities are freshman retention rate (89 percent at Fordham), acceptance rate (47 percent) and student-faculty ratio (13:1).

The downward trend Fordham is currently stuck in is not the norm for schools on the U.S. News list. For example, Pepperdine University, which was tied with Fordham at 57th on last year’s list, rose to 54th this year.

Fordham’s satellite programs also got mixed reviews from U.S. News. The law school was ranked 36th on its respective list, and the graduate business school was ranked 92nd. The best performer was the graduate school of social work, ranked 11th best in the country.

Fordham did make the top 10 in one category.

The school was ranked fourth among national Catholic universities, behind the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University and Boston College.

Fordham’s track record in other college ranking forums is stellar, if not spectacular. Forbes magazine ranked the school 163rd out of 650 schools in the U.S. The Princeton Review has also historically placed Fordham on its list of the 373 best colleges.

This is it: Fordham Daily’s last post! Breathe a sigh of relief, shed a tear — I’ll be doing both. I’ll always remember what my dad, a proud Fordham grad with a philosophy degree, told me just before we parted ways in front of Queen’s Court — the building he had inhabited some 30 years earlier — on a […]